1
When Ned Sweeney leaves the apartment on West Fourth Street it’s about 8:30 p.m. He’s feeling distinctly weird, disorientated—not drunk exactly, he’s only had three drinks in all, and over a period of hours—but not sober either, not normal. Is he coming down with something? A cold or the flu? There’s a bug going around, at least so he heard at the office today—or maybe it was in the elevator, or at the newsstand, or sitting at the lunch counter at Sherri’s. But isn’t there always a bug going around? Isn’t that one of those meaningless things people say to each other, everyone a doctor all of a sudden?
He huddles into his raincoat. The treetops and town house windows on West Fourth glisten in the orange wash of the streetlights. A taxi glides by … but it’s less a car than a pulsating yellow daub, loosely streaked with a line of checkers, little marching heartbeats of black and white.
This isn’t a cold.
He takes out his cigarettes, shivers, turns right and starts walking. After he crosses West Eleventh, he looks down at the pack of cigarettes in his hand, at the eponymous desert beast in profile, but it has the appearance of an alien object, something he’s not familiar with, this small, solid, rectangular container. He squeezes it. It isn’t solid. He squeezes it again, more tightly this time, crushing the cigarettes inside. He’s aware that he’s a smoker, and that he smokes a lot, but for some reason now the idea of smoking seems absurd to him.
He comes to a trash can on the sidewalk and tosses the pack.
For More Pure Pleasure.
That’s the line on all the advertisements and billboards these days, in The Saturday Evening Post, and up in Times Square.
With the giant smoke rings.
He walks on, passing Perry Street, then Charles, remembering older slogans.
Smoke as many as you want …
He stops at West Tenth, at the curb.
More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.
Traffic streams by. He watches it, and watches the flickering gaps between the cars as well—the asphalt, the small, oddly shaped pothole, the oily shimmer of a puddle left over from the earlier rain. In fact, he stands there at the curb for a good deal longer than is necessary. Longer than makes any sense.
He is thinking.
These ads—like all ads, really, like the ads his own agency comes up with—are lies. Smoke as many as you want? Someday people will laugh at this, because isn’t it obvious that cigarette smoking has to be bad for you?
He looks around. People are passing by quickly now, in both directions—a man in a gray suit not unlike his own, a woman in furs, a tall, loose-limbed black man. Then a young couple. These last two are attractive in a fashionably scruffy sort of way, artist types. As they cross the street in front of him, the girl looks back, over her shoulder. She meets his gaze, and then looks away again. She is doe-eyed and willowy, anemic.
This is Greenwich Village, after all.
That fellow back in the apartment, Mike Sutton, he’s an artist, too, or so he claimed. There weren’t any signs of it, though, no canvases anywhere, or easels, or tubes of paint. Unlike this pair, he’s clearly put his suffering days behind him.
Sweeney steps off the curb and crosses the street, trailing behind the young couple, not following them exactly … interested, though, curious. But then something strikes him out of the blue, and with considerable force. That Mike Sutton isn’t an artist at all, is he?
Floating along the street now toward Seventh Avenue, colors stretching past, the sidewalk disappearing beneath him like a conveyor belt, Sweeney replays the previous few hours in his mind, leafs through the people and places as he would through the pages of a contract or a quarterly report. It becomes apparent to him pretty quickly that Mike Sutton is a fraud. His apartment, the furniture, the fittings, the overall feel of the place—none of it adds up. He visualizes the coral and gray living room they were in, pictures with crystal clarity the lounge chair, the ottoman, the lacquered drinks cart with the oval-shaped glass shelves and the smoothly rolling casters … also the well-ordered bookcases, packed with titles such as A Pictorial History of American Ships and Fell’s International Coin Book. But it was all too neat, too deliberate, too much like a movie set.
He stops near the corner and closes his eyes.
There was that mirror, too. Something about it bothers him. It wasn’t over the fireplace, where you’d expect it to be. It was on the wall to the left. And that just skewed the balance of the room, visually. But how had Sweeney found himself there in the first place?
He and Matt Drake had been downtown earlier, chasing an account. They were on Eighth Avenue afterward when Drake bumped into Sutton coming out of a coffee shop. Drake and Sutton had been in the same unit in the army together during World War II and apparently there was a good deal to catch up on. Sweeney would have preferred to head back to the office, as he had some correspondence to get through and was also hoping to make the 5:25—it was Friday, after all—but Drake was the boss, and under the circumstances he just wasn’t confident enough to cut loose. So they made their way to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street for a quick drink, but one thing led to another and the three of them ended up going back to Sutton’s place on West Fourth Street.
Sweeney had sat there for ages nursing a rather strong, or, at any rate, strange-tasting martini. He remembers glancing around the room, taking it in, half listening to Drake and Sutton shoot the breeze. Oddly enough, though, he’s pretty sure that none of what’s striking him about the room now, in such detail, struck him then, while he was in it. And another thing he’s only now realizing—Matt Drake was scared of his own shadow.
On the face of it, this is ridiculous. Matt is his boss. He’s forty years old, confident, charming, a shoo-in for account director some day. But all of a sudden, Sweeney can see him as he really is, can almost see inside him, like an X-ray, the guilt and anxiety and self-hatred sluicing through his system.
Opening his eyes again, Sweeney is met with an intense barrage of visual stimulation—streetlights, store windows, cabs, buses, everything shimmering brightly, and powered not just by electricity, but by some unknown source that seems to be emanating directly from himself. He crosses Seventh Avenue, makes his way over to Waverly Place, and turns left onto Sixth. He is aware of trying to remain calm, but then realizes he is calm. Which doesn’t make any sense. St. Vincent’s Hospital is a couple of blocks away, and if he were to go in there to get his stomach pumped, that would make sense. Because he now has a strong suspicion that the key to this whole business is the strange-tasting martini he was sipping earlier. But the idea of going into the hospital just doesn’t interest him. Much more interesting, he thinks, would be to try to piece together what happened back in that apartment. Mike Sutton came across as someone who would pride himself on being able to make a good martini. He was a big man, chunky and muscular, but there was also something effete about him. He smoked du Mauriers. And he spent a lot of time with his back to the room, fussing at the drinks cart. He used Gordon’s and Noilly Prat—four parts to one part, Sweeney calculates—and two olives. But unless something was up with the olives there was definitely another element in the mix. It wasn’t brine, there was no cloudiness, or residue from the ice, or anything else you could identify. At the time, Sweeney was aware of only a slight oddness in the taste. Now he can almost see it, like a graphic superimposed on his retina, this fourth strand in the flavor spectrum. Then he revisualizes the sequence of Mike Sutton’s actions at the drinks cart, each movement of each arm, each accompanying clink and glug, and it’s soon clear to him that Sutton did something extra. He put something extra into at least one of the drinks—Sweeney can feel it, this substance, whatever it is, coursing through his bloodstream and lighting his brain up like a pinball machine.
But there is no fear, none at all, and there should be, because what Sutton did was highly irregular, not to say dangerous. What there is, again—shooting up simultaneously in a thousand little tendrils—is curiosity. What is this substance? Why did Sutton slip it to him? Who is Sutton anyway? Then there’s Matt Drake. How does he keep the act up? He isn’t a heavy drinker, he doesn’t play around or anything, but it sort of seemed to Sweeney as if he was on the point of cracking up. And reviewing the guy’s conversation with Sutton, their wartime catch-up, it’s evident why. There were certain modulations in tone as Drake was speaking, variations in register, chromatic dips, which coincided with references to some “incident” they had both witnessed, or maybe participated in, when they were stationed in Italy.
For his part, Mike Sutton displayed a remarkably cool detachment. In fact, there were even a couple of chromatic upticks, indicating … what? Excitement? Arousal? Sweeney can’t really say, but he has to wonder how many cases similar to Matt Drake’s there might be out in the world, people walking around like ghosts, emotional time bombs who have no idea how long or short their own fuses might be. And not just ordinary people … those in positions of authority, as well. Take the new vice president, for instance, Dick Nixon. (Please, as Henny Youngman would say.) There’s definitely something dark and twisted going on there—the rictus grin, the smarmy style, that business during the campaign with the funds and the dog. How short will his fuse turn out to be?
As Sweeney floats along the sidewalk, an answer forms in his mind. It’s obvious, in a way. Nixon is a sort of political pathogen, and to release someone like that into the system is asking for trouble. Because patterns of behavior persist, they replicate … and sooner or later—maybe in ’56, or in ’60, if he decides to run his own ticket, or even some time beyond that—there will surely be another scandal, another newspaper headline leading to another television broadcast, only this time on a wider scale, and with much deeper repercussions for the country.
Sweeney slows down a bit and glances around—the city’s electric swirl, on a millisecond delay, turning with him. He looks at his watch. What the hell is he doing? It’s after nine o’clock and he hasn’t called Laura yet to tell her he’s going to be late. He’ll be lucky to get the 9:45 now. He pictures his dinner in the oven, dried up and inedible, Tommy in bed, fast asleep, Laura in front of the TV, watching the Philco Playhouse or Revlon Mirror Theater, nervous, exasperated. Suddenly, this little picture of his domestic setup on Greenlake Avenue strikes him as profoundly strange. It’s as though he’s looking down on it from a great distance, from the sky, from another planet, no longer sure how any of it relates to him.
He crosses Twenty-Third Street. It’s the same when he thinks about his job at Ridley Rogan Blanford. Anything he pictures about the place—his cluttered desk, a successful piece of artwork, the view from Jack Rogan’s office—diminishes in significance almost immediately. It becomes small, irrelevant. But at the same time he feels amazing and is buzzing with energy.
It‘s all very confusing. For some unknown reason this guy back at the apartment on West Fourth slipped him a Mickey Finn. That usually means something like chloral hydrate, doesn’t it? Something to incapacitate the target, so they can be assaulted or robbed or otherwise taken advantage of.
But Ned Sweeney is more in control, more aware, and more confident than he has ever felt in his entire life. Normally—and anyone who knows him would say this—Sweeney is a quiet, unassuming kind of guy. He’s of average intelligence, works hard, and can be creative. But his ambitions are modest—to get ahead at the agency, to buy a bigger house some day, to keep Laura happy and send Tommy to college. Now all of that seems a bit dull, a bit limited. Sweeney is thirty-three years old. Is this supposed to be it?
Halfway along the next block, he spots a dingy bar and slips inside. He finds a pay phone at the rear. Normally, if he has to stay late in the city, if he’s stuck with clients or finishing something up at the office, he’ll be apprehensive about calling home, almost dreading the moment when Laura picks up. It isn’t a regular occurrence—he’s good about calling—it’s just that everything seems to make her anxious these days. But dialing her now, considerably later than he has on any previous occasion, he doesn’t feel the least bit apprehensive at all.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
“Oh my God, Ned, I’ve been worried sick.”
“I’m sorry, I got delayed and couldn’t call.” Hearing himself say this, he stops. “Actually, you know what, that’s not true. Of course I could have called. But I didn’t. I must have chosen not to. There must be—”
“What?”
“Uh … sorry?”
“Ned? Are you all right?”
“Yes, strangely enough, I am.”
“Are you drunk?”
“No, but I guess it must sound like I am, right? It’s pretty much what I thought at first, too, but there’s … there’s just so much clarity, so much—”
“Clarity? You’re in a bar, Ned, I can hear it in the background. Who are you with?”
“No one. But listen, Laura, it’s all … I mean, there’s…” He’s aware now of a gathering speed and complexity to his thought processes that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to put comprehensible sentences together, to squeeze the words he wants to say down a phone line to his wife, especially with so much noise in the background here, voices, laughter, clinking glasses, the crack of balls colliding on a pool table.
“Ned? What is it? Ned?”
“I’ll explain later, when I get home. Hug Tommy for me.”
He hangs up.
Sweeney does feel apprehensive now, but this time it’s at the thought of actually going home … because little by little, in his mind, 15 Greenlake Avenue is taking on the feel and dimensions of a doll’s house—brittle, confining, prison-like. Which is what he wanted to explain to Laura: that he understands, that he can see the way her whole life is circumscribed by convention, that of course she feels perpetually anxious, not to mention frequently pissed off at him.
But if the prize here is an individual “identity,” then how well is he doing—stuck every day, as he is, behind a desk on the fourteenth floor, in his gray flannel suit, a mere cog in the corporate machine? His sense of the absurdity of all this ripens to a point where he has to just block it out. Instead, he focuses on various snippets of conversation he overhears on his way to the exit, odd words and phrases—“Teamsters,” “Cyd Charisse,” “the roto-swirl agitator,” “flight 723,” “Mantle’s home run.” Instinctively, he extrapolates from these what each speaker is talking about, their point of view, possible gaps in their knowledge, flaws in their arguments—entire exchanges, in fact, all of it coming so thick and so fast that he gets a bit dizzy and brushes against a guy on the very last stool a few feet from the door.
“Hey, fella, watch it—”
“Sorry.”
“Jesus.”
“Oh, and by the way, it was five hundred sixty-five.”
“What?”
Raising his hand to push the door open, Sweeney half turns back to look at the guy. “Mantle’s home run?” he says. “In April? The tape-measure thing? It was five hundred sixty-five feet, not four hundred sixty-five…”
Back out on the sidewalk, he keeps moving, powered by the motor of his thoughts. But just how fast is he going? Because very soon—sooner than seems possible—he’s all the way up at Forty-Second Street. He’s also on the right side of the avenue now. He looks around, a little confused. When did he cross over? He has no recollection of doing so. None at all. This is alarming. He can conjure up long-forgotten details from when he was a kid, random stuff, anything … that small tin on his mother’s dresser, for instance, Stein’s Face Powder, with the weird list of colors on the back of it: Pink, Sallow, Olive, Cream, Othello, Indian, Lavender. But he can’t recall crossing the street five or ten minutes ago?
And where is he headed anyway? Because if he doesn’t want to go home, if that’s too strange an option to even contemplate, what’s left? Maybe more to the point, how long is this going to last? Not that he wants it to end or anything—he doesn’t. What he wants, in fact, now that he thinks about it, is something to do. Or someone to talk to. But as more blocks flicker past, the lights of the city merging into a dense, multicolored plasma, he reckons he might be on the point of collapsing and actually dying right here on the sidewalk. Or perhaps he’s already dead and this is just what it’s like.
Though after a moment—after several moments probably, a rapid sequence of them—he finds himself somewhere else, indoors, at a bar. He’s got a drink in his hand. It’s a much fancier bar than the last one, and he’s talking to someone, a guy in his forties. “So yeah,” he’s saying, “I work in advertising all right, but I can’t help seeing it as this gigantic lie, because let’s face it, here we are in 1953, eight years on from the war, and as a society we’re already capable of producing whatever we need to survive, more than enough, in fact, and I mean for everyone—food, automobiles, TV sets, shirts, toothpaste, cigarettes, you name it. But you know what the problem is? It’s not that we’re not producing enough stuff—we are. It’s that we’re not consuming enough.”
“But—”
“Our future as a democracy is contingent upon our ability to spend, to keep consumption in line with output, and we have to work harder at that, because there’s no reversing this thing. The industrial output of goods and services is never going to stop, regardless of what we might need today and regardless of the fact that ten, twenty, fifty years from now, we’ll inevitably have reached some outer limit of what it’s even possible to consume. Plus, we’ll have made ourselves sick in the process, actually poisoned ourselves, poisoned the planet, or blown ourselves up.”
“So how—”
“Look around. Everyone’s stalking the supermarket aisles, they’re haunting the car dealerships, they’re flicking through the Sears catalog, all in this hypnoidal trance. And who are the snake charmers?” Sweeney takes a mock bow. “The ad agencies up and down Madison Avenue, that’s who. They’re all—we’re all—using new psychiatric probing techniques to chart the very fabric of the human mind. And we’re not doing it to find out what people want, that’s a dead end, we’re doing it to find out how to make people want stuff.”
“That’s quite an extraordinary thesis you’ve got there, Mr.… uh?”
“Sweeney. Ned Sweeney. I’m with RRB, on Madison Avenue. What about you?” Extending his hand, he throws a surreptitious glance out over the room. However he’s ended up here, he reckons the place is an upscale watering hole for Midtown executive types.
The guy shakes his hand. “Vance Packard,” he says. “I work for American Magazine, over on Fifth, in the Crowell-Collier Building.”
At the mention of this, a Technicolor blizzard of magazine covers flits across Sweeney’s brain.
“You’re a journalist?”
“Yes. I do features mainly.” Packard then looks at his watch. “You know what, Ned, I’d love to continue this conversation, because I have a ton of questions I want to put to you, but I have to meet someone at the Waldorf. It won’t take more than ten minutes. I don’t suppose you’d like to tag along?”
At the entrance to the Waldorf, Packard engages briefly in some banter with the doormen, after which he and Sweeney skip up the short flight of stairs to the main foyer. As a New Yorker, Sweeney has passed the Waldorf many times, but he’s never actually been inside it. Despite this, he seems to have accumulated a considerable knowledge of the place—mostly, he supposes, from magazine articles and movies. As they walk across the foyer, he notices everything in detail, the Rockwood-stone walls and columns, the travertine floors, the Louis Rigal frieze (an elaborate, thirteen-panel allegory about hunting, eating, drinking, and dancing), and that bizarre rug, with its central, six-part circular tapestry depicting the drama of human existence, the Wheel of Life, all of it stretching out before him now, oscillating, threatening to come alive and engulf him.
But he keeps walking, and follows Packard over to what is known as Peacock Alley. This wide, corridor-like affair leads through to the hotel’s central lobby, but it is also a busy lounge area lined on either side with tables and chairs. Most of these are occupied, and more people are standing around in little groups, with the occasional staff member gliding past in one direction or another, carrying a tray of drinks or holding up a telegram.
A few feet ahead of him, Packard slows down, half turns, and indicates to Sweeney that he won’t be long. He then approaches someone at a nearby table and joins him. Sweeney slows down, too, and makes a gentle turn, feeling slightly dizzy as he takes in the opulence of his surroundings—the French walnut paneling inlaid with ebony, the glass display cabinets showcasing expensive jewelry, the marble pilasters and nickel-bronze cornices. He starts to drift back toward the foyer, but in the next moment, and before he knows it, he’s standing among a small group of men, everyone smoking, everyone having a drink, everyone listening … to him. “Consider it like this, gentlemen. A new highway opens, or a new expressway, or a new bridge, and a month later, however modest the projections might have been, it’s already operating at full capacity, so simply building more of them is not the answer. It might actually be the problem. If we continue to churn out cars at this rate, followed by road networks to accommodate them, what do you think the city’s going to look like in 1963? Or in 1973? By all means build roads, but you’ve got to expand the mass-transit system, too.”
“Well, shoot,” one of the men standing next to him, a fat guy in a silk suit, whispers loudly. “Don’t let RM hear you say that.”
The others laugh.
RM?
Glancing around, Sweeney quickly scans the room. Further back, Vance Packard is still sitting at that table talking to—or, rather, listening to—another man. Sweeney squints. The man is probably in his sixties. He’s distinguished-looking and radiates a certain authority. It takes a couple of seconds, but of course … this is Robert Moses, the powerful city parks commissioner, and these guys here have to be his entourage.
Sweeney turns back to look at them again. He shakes his head. “RM isn’t going to stop, is he? It’s not in his nature. He’s just going to keep doing the same thing over and over again, wave after wave of it, each phase bigger than the last, the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Horace Harding, this Lower Manhattan thing, whatever … he’s chasing that elusive solution, the big fix—forty-five to sixty billion dollars over the next eight to twelve years, isn’t that the figure I read somewhere recently?”
“Hey—”
“And no one’ll say boo to him. That’s the problem.”
The men seem taken aback by this. One of them, a slim, nervous type in a bow tie, raises his eyebrows. “Do you want to give it a try?”
Sweeney shrugs. “Look, I don’t have—”
But then the fat guy flinches and says, “Oh, shitsky.” They all turn to see Moses striding toward them from the far end of the lounge area.
Is it possible to smell fear? With a fine spray of it in the air now, Sweeney certainly can.
“Time to ship out, fellas,” Moses barks as he approaches. There’s a rush to extinguish cigarettes. Drinks are abandoned on any available surface. As this is going on, Moses comes to a stop directly in front of Sweeney and just stands there.
“Who are you?” he says gruffly.
“Oh, I’m nobody, Mr. Moses,” Sweeney answers, “just a regular schmo who comes into the city every day on the train, on the noisy, dirty Toonerville Trolley. You see, I live in the suburbs, but I don’t own an automobile, so I guess I’m … what would you call me, a relic?”
Moses stares at him for a second, puzzled, processing what he’s heard, or thinks he’s heard. He moves his head slightly to the side. “Charlie? Charlie? Who is this clown?”
“Oh, Mr. Moses,” the fat guy says, rushing over, “I don’t actually—”
“Traffic will run smoothly?” Sweeney says, ignoring Charlie. “That’s the prediction you keep making, year after year, like a … a mantra, but don’t you see, it’s never going to happen.”
Moses’s nostrils flare and a reddish, almost purple flush colors his cheeks. This isn’t how people talk to him. He continues staring at Sweeney in disbelief but seems curiously unable to respond.
“It’s the numbers,” Sweeney goes on quietly, “they just don’t stack up. They can’t. They only go one way, and in terms of car ownership and daily commutes, the progression isn’t even arithmetical, it’s geometrical. It’s like with everything else”—he takes a quick, deep breath—“in our society, in the economy, in the culture, all around us, it’s just one big, ever-expanding, self-replicating fractal pattern.”
“Fractal?” Moses whispers. “Mantra? What the hell does that mean? What are you talking about?” Then, as though snapping awake from a trance, he turns to Fat Charlie and shakes his head. “What kind of liquor are they serving here?”
“Beats me, sir.”
When Moses starts to move away, Sweeney leans in. “Uh, just one thing, Mr. Moses.”
“What, goddammit? I’m busy.”
“Talk to Walter O’Malley, would you? Please.”
Moses pulls back, as though to get a clearer look at Sweeney’s face. “What did you say?”
“You heard me. If you don’t let the O’Malley build his stadium on Atlantic Avenue, he’ll move the Dodgers out of Brooklyn. Don’t think he won’t do it.”
Fat Charlie makes a snorting sound. “That’s ridiculous.”
“You think?” Sweeney says. “The Boston Braves have just moved to Milwaukee.”
“But that’s—”
“Look, it’d be a business decision. Ebbets Field is crumbling, no one can get to it, and if they can, there’s nowhere to park. The site O’Malley wants is right over by the Flatbush Terminal. People like me would come pouring in on the LIRR.”
“All right,” Moses barks, half lunging at him. “Who the hell are you?”
Fat Charlie and Skinny Bow Tie intervene. As they cajole a furious Moses away toward the Park Avenue foyer, Sweeney just stands there and watches. Then he glances back and sees that Packard, still at the table, is consulting his notepad. Was he interviewing Moses? It seemed a bit short and informal for that, and anyway, Sweeney is pretty sure Moses doesn’t actually give interviews. He’s too important, or considers himself so, to endure the inconvenience. Nevertheless, Packard here is no hack. Didn’t he spend a whole week the previous January with the Eisenhowers as they settled into the White House? Didn’t he write about it for American Magazine?
Whichever it was, Sweeney is quickly losing interest. Robert Moses, for all his power and standing, strikes him as a fairly one-dimensional and transparent figure. Nor is Sweeney interested, for that matter, in answering any more of Vance Packard’s questions about advertising. He’s really said all he wants to say on the subject. So before the journalist happens to look up and spot him, he slips away. He doesn’t go in the direction Moses went, but the other way, toward the hotel’s bigger, busier central lobby. Here, as he moves about, voices slide in and out of his hearing, colors shift subtly, surfaces shimmer. Passing the registration desk, then a newsstand, then a cigar counter, he feels the strongest urge to stop and talk to someone, anyone. He needs to engage. But he also knows it can’t be inconsequential, it can’t just be small talk.
He keeps moving, and over the next couple of minutes wanders deeper into the hotel’s maze of hallways and corridors, connecting galleries and side lobbies. But it may be longer than a couple of minutes, because once again he has the impression that time is skipping, jumping forward in barely perceptible increments, the missing beats like frames cut from a strip of film. He ends up at a bank of elevators near the Lexington Avenue exit and is staring at the elaborate bas-relief Art Deco design on one of the blue-steel doors when he becomes aware of people behind him, approaching—voices, one low and husky, mumbling, the other higher and sweeter, giggling.
“Going up?”
To his left, a tuxedo-sleeved arm reaches for the button, presses it, and withdraws.
He detects something—or, rather, many things, and all in an instant—cadence, pitch, inflection. Also, a scent, a fragrance. Without turning, he says, “Rose Geranium?”
There is a brief pause, and then, “I beg your pardon?”
“Floris,” he says, turning slightly, but not making eye contact. “Rose Geranium by Floris? Your perfume?”
“Why, yes.” Another brief pause, and a giggle. “Bet you couldn’t do that, Mar.”
The elevator door pings open. The attendant looks out and smiles. “Good evening.” He steps aside to let them all in. “Please.”
The ride in the elevator passes in a flash. Whatever happens in those few moments, and in the few after that, whatever is said—and it’s probably plenty—Sweeney is hardly conscious of any of it. The space is too enclosed, the rush of sensory impressions too intense. In fact, the next time he feels any degree of control he is sitting in an armchair in a luxurious room, and Marilyn—in her black, pleated chiffon dress—is handing him a drink.
“I never heard it put that way before,” she is saying.
He takes the drink. “Well, it serves our purposes to portray the Soviet system as evil, to portray Communism as a form of cancer, but to be honest, Joe Stalin was no Communist, and neither is this new fellow, Nikita Khrushchev, not really, not by any strict definition of the term. What these guys are, however, is autocrats, and to the bone. I mean, it’s just how they roll over there. Look at the tsars, it was no different back then, either…” As Sweeney is speaking, he glances around the room. This is a residential suite in the Waldorf Towers. He didn’t register where they were heading in the elevator, but glancing out the window now, and seeing a corner of what he takes to be Forty-Ninth Street, he reckons they are probably on the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth floor. “… so what this is really about is control. They use the iron fist and the jackboot—we use soap powder and paranoia.”
Marilyn is curled up on the couch opposite him now, listening intently. Brando, tie loosened, is pacing back and forth between them.
“But sooner or later,” Sweeney continues, “if we’re not careful, if we don’t stand up to people like the senator from Wisconsin, that distinction will become blurred and will ultimately lose its meaning.”
“Jesus, Ned,” Brando says, “you’re killing me with this stuff.” He stops and turns toward Marilyn. “I mean … I see Gadge all the time now, every day, I gotta look him in the eye, and I … I…”
“Oh, Mar…”
It’s a nice room, warm, clearly lived in. A bulletin board on the wall next to the door has some photos and cuttings pinned to it. There are books (Invisible Man, Sister Carrie) and magazines (Popular Science, Modern Screen) lying around. There is also a pile of typed pages bound with brass fasteners.
“Listen,” Sweeney says, “I’m not just talking about the hearings, or about one guy giving names. It’s bigger than that, it’s about all of us … all of us capitulating at the most basic level, all of us being complicit in our own moral and aesthetic suffocation.”
“All right, all right…” Brando says, turning around slowly, his fists clenched, a pained expression on his face. “Just who the hell are you, man?”
A bit later—ten minutes, twenty, an hour, it’s hard to tell—Sweeney finds himself sitting on the other sofa, in quiet conclave with Marilyn. Brando is in another room, on a bed presumably, or maybe on the floor, snoring audibly.
“I don’t mind being famous,” Marilyn is whispering, “it’s kind of fun, most of the time anyway, but then people can surprise you. They can be awfully cruel, you know. They can say things that just make you want to give it all up.” She traces the line of a pleat on her dress with her finger. “But I think I’m probably going to do that anyway, sooner or later, you know? Give all this up, and retire.” She pauses. “Into private life.”
“Listen, Marilyn,” Sweeney says, staring at her arm, her shoulder, her neck, tracing an imaginary line of his own. “That’s not going to happen. There is no private life, not anymore, not for you, not for him in there either. You two are already so … so imprinted on the collective consciousness that I don’t see … I don’t…”
He feels a sudden ripple of exhaustion, of weakness almost.
“Don’t see what, Ned?”
There is a hint of alarm in her voice.
“You’re how old, Marilyn? Twenty-six, twenty-seven?” Sweeney glances in the direction of the other room. “He’s twenty-nine?”
She nods.
“Okay, well, this level of fame you have now? It’s not going away. Not ever.” A pain starts throbbing behind his eyes. “Your career may peak at some point, then subside, and that could happen soon, next year, or the year after, or in 1960—or it may have happened already, who knows—but your actual fame? That will never see a peak, and therefore never subside. It can only ever expand, and widen, and fragment…”
Which is what Marilyn is doing now, fragmenting right there in front of him … multiple Marilyns in a grid, rapidly self-replicating, all bright colors at first, but then dimming, draining to a pallid gray …
At that point there is a shift, another jump cut. To the street.
Did he vomit in the elevator on the way down? He’s not sure, but he has a really sour taste in his mouth as he walks up Lexington Avenue.
As he limps, actually.
He looks at his watch. It’s late, after one, and much colder than before—so cold that his mind feels sort of numb. Approaching Fifty-Seventh Street, he slows down. Then he comes to a stop, right there in the middle of the sidewalk. Where was he just now? At the Waldorf Astoria? Inches from Marilyn Monroe? Gazing at her bare shoulders? Inhaling her perfume, her whispers?
Really?
And before that?
There were other people, other conversations, but he can’t piece any of it together. He’s confused, and tired. He hasn’t eaten.
Will his dinner still be in the oven when he gets home? For that matter, will his home still be there when he gets off the train? Suddenly, more than anything else in the world, he needs to get to Greenlake Avenue. He starts walking again, in the opposite direction, moving fast, then faster. After a while, he throws his arm out and hails a passing yellow cab.
He piles into the backseat and tells the driver Penn Station. The driver flicks his flag down and hits the gas. Probably in the middle of his shift, the guy is fidgety, anxious to talk. Sweeney tunes in and out. “… that’s where I saw it,” the driver is saying at one point, “in that new magazine they’re putting out, the TV Guide it’s called, real neat little thing, fits right in your pocket. You ever see that, ever read it yourself, the TV Guide?”
Sweeney doesn’t answer. He is staring out the window now, any shred of attention he has left consumed by the hypnotic pull of the city’s lights as they flicker past.
Copyright © 2018 by Alan Glynn
